In a small room lit by oil lamps, Generals and Staffs were bending over huge maps scored heavily with red and blue pencils. Telephones buzzed and half conversations with tiny voices coming from back there kept all the others silent. Orderlies came in motor overalls with all the dust of France over them. They gave us food,--whisky, bully and bread, apples with which we filled our pockets. Of our Corps they knew nothing, but after much telephoning they “thought” we should find them at Château Beines. The Scot and I looked at one another. Château Beines was ten minutes from the burning hangars. We had passed it on our way down empty, silent, hours ago, in another life. Would the horses get us back up that interminable climb? Who should we find when we got there--our people or Germans? We rode back to Buchoire and distributed apples to the Babe, the Stand-by and the others and broke it to them that we had to go back on the chance of finding our brigade. The horses had been watered but not fed. We turned about and caught up French transport which had blocked the road in both directions. We straightened them out, a wagon at a time, after endless wagging of hands and tongues and finally got to Château Beines to find a French Headquarters installed there who knew nothing about our brigade. There were English artillery in the farm a mile farther. We went there. The farm was a ruin wreathed in fog, but from beneath the now smoking hangars a battery of ours was spitting shells into the night. Headquarters was somewhere in the farm cellar. We followed up a chink of light to its source and found a row of officers lying on wooden beds of rabbit netting, a signaller squatting on a reel of wire in the corner over a guttering candle, the concrete roof dripping moisture upon them. It was 3 a.m. Orders were to come into action at once and open fire on a certain main-road junction. The Scot and I went out and scoured ploughed fields waist-deep in drifting mist, looking for a position, found a belt of turf on the edge of a road and fetched the guns up. Locating the position on the map, working out the angle of the line of fire and the range with protractors took us back to the cellar where those lucky devils who were not commanding batteries were lying stertorous. Horses and men sweated their heart’s blood in getting the guns into position on the spongy ground and within an hour the first ear-splitting cracks joined in the chorus of screaming resistance put up by the other two batteries, with gunners who lost their balance at the weight of a shell and fell upon their faces, picking themselves up without even an oath and loading up again in a stupor by a process of sub-conscious reflex energy. What are the limits of human endurance? Are there any? We had three more days and nights of it and still those men went on. 25